The Itanium Solutions Blog

On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I was delighted to see Intel’s announcement today of the Itanium Processor Series 9300 and the fact that this chip is now actively shipping to server manufacturers. This chip, code named Tukwila, has been long awaited by customers as well as ISVs and systems integrators who make up the extensive Itanium ecosystem.

Intel maintains that the 9300 will double the performance of current generation Itanium processors; great news for all who are developing mission-critical solutions on Itanium and look to harness the unique advantages of this next generation architecture. While the processor is admittedly late, to quote analyst Nathan Brookwood in a recent post: “in this class of market, it’s more important to get [the chip] right than it is to get it early”.

Intel has planned an extensive launch for this latest generation chip, read Intel’s press release, product brief, and whitepaper. I look forward to hearing reports from customers and ISVs as they begin to deploy these Itanium chips over the next several quarters.

Well now that 2010 is off  and running, its a great time to be thinking about and planning your database upgrades on Itanium. In case you aren’t aware,  Oracle 11g Release 2 is now available for HP-UX on Itanium with new features that will help customers to reduce costs, increase mission-critical performance, as well as increasing flexibility, scalability and manageability. For more info on the new 11g release, visit the  Oracle.com  11g site and/or download the new release for Itanium.

In this new Alliance whitepaper featuring 8 of our 2009 Itanium Innovation Award finalists, read how real companies tackled mission-critical issues and achieved truly outstanding results using Itanium-based solutions. The companies profiled in this whitepaper represent diverse industries from around the globe including healthcare, energy, education and retail. They  have one important thing in common, their reliance on Itanium servers to successfully power their most mission-critical operations. If you are an enterprise customer evaluating your platform options for a mission-critical application, either a move from a legacy platform or a new deployment, this paper is a must read.

Windows Server 2008 R2, the long awaited, standards-based OS from Alliance Charter Member, Microsoft, is now generally available. R2 provides an opportunity for data centers to increase flexibility, improve performance, reduce costs, and increase scalability. With this latest release, customers can take advantage of mainframe-class reliability, fail-over clustering, as well as massive scalability — up to 64 IA64 sockets on a single server and up to 2 terabytes of RAM. These outstanding RAS features coupled with the inherent features of Itanium, such as  EPIC architecture and large cache, provide customers a rock solid platform on which to deploy their highest performance mission-critical applications. Detailed information on Windows Server 2008 R2 is available on Microsoft website.

In addition, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is being released this month. With SQL Server R2, organizations will be able to scale database operations with confidence, improve IT and developer efficiency, and allow users to access highly scalable and well managed BI applications at cost effective prices, especially compared to competitive alternatives. With this release on Itanium, customers can run the largest possible scale-up scenarios on SQL - up to 256 logical processors. For those of you who are running Windows applications on Itanium, please share your feedback on these exciting products from Microsoft.

The Alliance recently received some great coverage for its 2009 Innovation Awards event in San Francisco from Lorraine Bartlett, HP’s Vice President Marketing and Strategy/Operations, Business Critical Systems. On the HP Mission Critical Computing blog, there is a link to some excellent video footage  that was shot at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art featuring short interviews with Lorraine and 5 of our 2009 Award Finalists. I think you will find Lorraine’s post and the Awards Video quite interesting and a great testimony to the truly innovative ways that customers are utilizing Itanium-based servers to solve their most challenging, mission-critical business problems. Many thanks to HP for sharing this video.